Month: June 2017

I use to shoot ferrania film quite a bit when it was still readily available in, of all places, the pound shop. ‘Solaris 200’ use to sit along side ‘agfa vista 200’, while gainer than the latter it was better for colours with deep blues that ‘popped’ out. It was, at one time, my favourite colour film, even coming with me on trips.

Keeping this short, this new film is the black and white p30, they have recently produced and sold. It was delayed a little, much to the annoyance of many. I got 5, and gave 3 away to friends. Share the wealth.

Here are a few snapshots using the film. First thoughts are that it isn’t as forgiving as most films, lot of blown highlights. Using a yellow filter the contrast is high. Its a distinctive look.

The film was developed in rodinal APH 09 1 + 50 for 8 minutes. One minute agitation at start then 1 per minute thereafter.

Last week I revisited an old favourite spot for landscape photography. I have made many photos on this field/hill ¹²³. I wanted to finally try my noon pinhole camera while the weather was nice and bright enough for pinhole photography.

This isn’t a review, but here are some thoughts on the camera. The craftsmanship and finish of the wooden camera is nice, but could be better by polishing all four sides of the camera the same colour. That said, it looks good on a shelf. It would make a nice gift for a photographer. Appearances and build quality aside, and with practicality in mind, its a little bulky. A spirit level is absent (I taped one on) and the body doesn’t have composition aids, things you find on the excellent reality so subtle cameras. The shutter, a simple sliding piece of felted wood, is okay in that it works but once or twice while walking it would slide open by itself despite being relatively tight against the wood. The pinhole itself looks efficient and clean with no defects. The back of the camera features a hole for frame numbers which I taped up, not trusting it on a very bright day.

The images the camera produces are sharp enough, not to a reality so subtle standard, but fine in pinhole terms. The images also have vignetting issues, commonly found in most pinhole cameras that don’t curve. The vignetting seems very pronounced at the top of the frame, rather than the usually balanced subtle drop off towards the centre which is often the case for pinhole photography.

Here are a few images taken on expired kodak ektar and souped in, what I didn’t know at the time, exhausted c41 developer. Lots of funky colours which I tried to sort out on scanning the film.

Noon do not make this particular model anymore, instead they make a more refined version which appears to resolve some of the negative aspects such as size and weight. I should also note as this is more a hand made item, rather than manufactured. Logically each camera and it’s results will be a little different from one to the next.

I don’t think the camera is practical, it lacks composition aids and seems overly bulky making it awkward to use. It is however a solid working camera with simple moving parts and no electronics, that will out live most film cameras.

Shooting the film- no surprise, I underexposed. Instead of the native 250iso, I shot it at 800 so that I could carry on using my usual hyperfocal focusing technique (I usually shoot at 1600 for this). Additionally I used a yellow filter.

I developed it in hc110 dilution h 1:63 for 20 minutes, a time I figured out based on the 400iso times. The roll came out with too much contrast, crap for printing but okay for scanning. I was expecting grain having seen images on flickr of punchy grain riddled images at even 400iso. Maybe I’ll mix rodinal into the hc110 next time for a more gritty look, especially if I do some street photography.

The images have a broad tonality with shadows keeping lots of detail even with a yellow filter. The film, when paired with hc110, has a nice look to it. I want to say it has a indie movie quality look to it, but that’s a given -its motion picture film.

There are many Russian LTM lenses. Some have an almost cult like following such as the jupiter 3, the more affordable jupiter 8, and the sharp, often rumoured radioactive, industar 61LD. I can vouch for the latter two as being decent for any zorki, fed, voigtlander and even leica rangefinder. The Industar 69 does not come close to any of these lenses.

The lens is actually for a Russian half frame camera, which has enough coverage for my fuji mirrorless, and is a weird zorki m39 mount, similar to the l39 mount used on leica screw cameras but with no rangefinder coupling and a different flange distance. Since it is slightly different from a typical screw lens, the lens requires modification for focusing to infinite when paring with a l39 lens adaptor, this can be done in minutes. There are other, more time consuming ways to achieve this, such as filing down adaptors, but this seems a little overkill for a cheap lens.

The pancake form factor and the 28mm, which results in a wide normal lens around 43-44mm on a aps sensor, makes for a convenient little lens. At the widest aperture nothing is sharp, though it favours the centre with dramatic falloff and blurred edges. It can be sharp around f5.6 but better at f11.

Yes, the lens is awful, but at the same time its becoming my favourite lens on my xpro1. For me, digital photography is too perfect at times. In the film realm I have my leica for straight photography and then I have my holga for pictorial-artistic sort of images, polar opposites. This lens, which didn’t cost much from Bulgaria, creates interesting artistic images with distortions that are not present in the perfect native fuji glass. It fulfils a role away from straight photography.